A
TRAVELING EXHIBITION. THOUSANDS OF BODIES. A WOMAN AND A BOY SURVIVE

Starting
in September of 1941, the Nazis marched tens of thousands of Jews to the edge
of the Babyn Yar Ravine in Ukraine. There they stripped the townspeople, shot
and pushed them in.

Babyn
Yar is the name of a ravine in the northwestern section of Kyiv. A. Anatoli
described the ravine as "enormous, you might even say majestic: deep and wide,
like a mountain gorge. If you stood on one side of it and shouted you would
scarcely be heard on the other."

It was here that the Nazis shot the Jews. In small groups of ten, the Jews
were taken along the edge of the ravine. One of the very few survivors remembers
she "looked down and her head swam, she seemed to be so high up. Beneath her
was a sea of bodies covered in blood."

Once
the Jews were lined up, the Nazis used a machine-gun to shoot them. When shot,
they fell into the ravine. Then the next were brought along the edge and shot.
According to the Einsatzgruppe Operational Situation Report No. 101, 33,771
Jews were killed at Babyn Yar on September 29 and 30.

But
this was not the end of the killing at Babyn Yar. The Nazis next rounded up
Gypsies and killed them. Patients of the Pavlov Psychiatric Hospital were
gassed and then dumped into the ravine. Soviet prisoners of war were brought
to the ravine and shot. Thousands of other civilians were killed at Babyn
Yar for trivial reasons, such as a mass shooting in retaliation for just one
or two people breaking a Nazi order. The killing continued for months. It
is estimated that possibly up to 100,000 people were murdered there.

The
Babyn Yar massacre is considered to be "the largest single massacre in the
history of the Holocaust."